Leslie's Laughs

  [An apology to all those who don't share my opinion or my experiences.  To misquote Khushwant Singh, it's written with malice to none at all.  But seriously, India Today, 75 - nay 76 years - later, needs to hear this. A chance encounter with Vedika Singh, an energetic intern, caused me to finally pull this out and write it down.  I must confess I had attempted to get ChatGPT to write this just to see how it would fare. As you can imagine it was all artificial and no intelligence.  But that's the free version.  I understand if you pay a tidy sum it can even select things to write that you never knew existed.  Another time, another story.] History A friend of mine turned 60 last year and a great big bash was planned, secretly.  He loves to read - apart from being glued to Netflix, I hear.  So, in a flash of what was then mistaken for brilliance, I decided that I would present him with a One Year Subscription to Reader's Digest (with bonus fre...

  Image by upklyak on Freepik I am sure many of us are shortsighted enough to remember the good old eye-testing charts beginning with a large E and ending with an indecipherable string of letters which apparently no one but Superman can read. Well, that happens to me every morning but with a few bells and whistles thrown in. Let me explain. The Eyetest Equipment: The daily newspaper. In my case, The Telegraph. The Day: Everyday except when the powers-that-be declare a string of holidays as in the recently concluded Pujas. The Place: My favourite place is the "Library" which some people call the Necessarium or the plebs call the Bogs. For one thing, there's no fan and pages don't fly. For another, some of the news is so frightening is scares the crap out of you. The Story So, just like the eye-test, they soften you up by giving you a few large advertisements in the first four or four and a half pages.  Easy on the eye - some of the pin-up girls in jewellery are even ea...